Slamming a Door on Tradition: Jean Dubuffet: 1901-1985

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"I believe," Jean Dubuffet declared in 1958, "in the utility of oblivion. In fact I should like to see a mammoth statue of Oblivion in the main square of every town, instead of the libraries and museums. Let us make a clean sweep of the art of the past!" Fat chance. Such manifestos had already been part of the rubric of modernism -- or of a certain kind of modernism -- for the best part of half a century, since the Futurist Filippo Marinetti and the Dadaist Hugo Ball exhorted the young to burn their museums for the sake of the new age to come. And they led, on iron rails, to the museum itself.

When Dubuffet died of emphysema last week at 83, he was the most honored senior painter in France -- indeed the most important French visual artist of any kind to emerge since World War II. In the past two decades alone, his oeuvre had filled eight full-scale museum retrospectives and countless one-man shows from Chicago to Paris. Large corporations like Chase Manhattan saw him as a wild pet laden with status, and commissioned huge, dull sculptures from him for their plazas. His fiercely polemical essays, long-winded but dense with aphorism, were collected in two thick volumes. (Nobody has written more eloquently in defense of illiteracy than Dubuffet; in this, as in the bureaucratic precision with which his staff kept tabs on his pursuit of the raw, the primal and the instinctive, he was a peculiarly French figure.)

The intensity and impact of Dubuffet's career were all the more vivid for its late start. Born in Le Havre in 1901, he followed his father's trade as a wine merchant and (apart from one desultory spell as an art student in his teens, and another in the 1930s) did not commit himself to painting until after his 41st birthday. Yet by the end of the war, and especially by 1947 -- when he exhibited his riotously funny and touching series of portraits of French intellectuals and writers -- Dubuffet's work was not only an object of public scandal but also an essential part of the imagery of postwar France, like Sartre's writings.

Dubuffet's interest in the rudimentary and the inchoate meant that conventional subjects were dissected into their most ignoble components. His excremental landscapes and turnip-men, set down in meandering lines and harrowed clods of pigment, were not ordinary -- they were frighteningly banal. "It is where the picturesque is absent," he remarked, "that I am in a state of constant amazement."

His work brilliantly embodied the crisis of belief in finesse and cultural hierarchies that hit postwar French intellectual life. He had an unerring instinct for farce. Picasso had painted bulls, but for decades few advanced artists had painted a cow, and when Dubuffet did so it seemed to set itself against a whole tradition of animal as heroic metaphor. And for those who (understandably) yearned for a return to the French pictorial tradition of luxe, calme et volupte, the sight of Dubuffet's monstrous kippered nudes squashed flat in their beds of pigment was not only an affront, it was like the slamming of a door on a much loved tradition. Such Dubuffets were shocking in a way that no Picassos, by the mid-'50s, could possibly have been.